This invention relates to the design of a data center. More particularly, a system and methods are provided for facilitating the design of a data center based on requirements of equipment to be installed, and/or selecting a configuration of computer equipment to be installed in a data center based on the capacities of the data center.
The concept of a “data center,” a room or space designed for the operation of computer equipment, arose with the development of mainframe computers. Early data centers were therefore tailored to the requirements of a monolithic computing entity, in terms of power, cooling, physical space and so on. A few pieces of auxiliary or peripheral equipment may have been included in an early data center, but the requirements of the mainframe computer dwarfed those of any collocated resources.
Because the operation of a data center was focused on a single (and rather large) entity, the design of a data center typically focused on one parameter or criterion—the amount of power needed to operate the mainframe computer. This parameter could be expressed in watts per square foot (watts/ft2). From the power requirements, the size or capacity of the equipment needed to dissipate heat generated by the mainframe could be estimated. The power and cooling requirements of the data center could be assumed to be uniform over the entire space of the data center as long as they were based on the requirements of the mainframe.
However, this traditional method of designing a data center is woefully inadequate in dealing with the decentralized computing solutions of today's data centers. Present data centers host multiple computers, of varying capabilities and requirements, along with significant peripheral equipment (e.g., storage arrays). When the methodology used to design past data centers is applied to a data center today, the power requirements of the various equipment are combined to yield an overall power consumption. That measure is divided by the size of the data center to provide an antiquated and inaccurate estimate of power (and cooling) needed on a per-square foot basis.
More specifically, there are now tens or hundreds of separate computing entities in a data center (e.g., personal computers, servers, large capacity storage arrays). These entities have varying power (and other) requirements, and are unlikely to be evenly distributed in terms of those requirements. Therefore, the power requirement yielded by yesterday's yardstick, in terms of an average number of watts/ft2, is insufficient.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for designing a data center for equipment having various capacities and requirements, wherein the individual requirements of each piece of equipment are adequately considered. In addition, because of the diverse nature of the equipment, requirements other than their power needs should be considered.
Yet further, there is a need for a system and method of tailoring the composition of equipment installed in a data center to the capacities of the data center. For example, when an existing space is to be converted into a data center or the equipment installed in an existing data center is to be replaced, the capacities of the data center (e.g., available power and cooling, physical size, weight limitations) should be considered when selecting the new equipment to be installed.